A day after police in Victoria, Australia issued a warning to motorists advising them not to rely on Apple Maps for directions to the town of Mildura due to a location error that led several drivers to become stranded in*remote Murray-Sunset National Park, The Guardian reports that Apple has fixed the error.

The error placed the town of Mildura some 45 miles away from its actual location and led to numerous motorists being stranded. The Victoria police responded by describing using the app to navigate as "potentially life-threatening."

While the label on Apple's maps has not yet been updated to show the correct location of Mildura, searches for and directions to the town now show the proper location.

Interestingly, The Register reports that the error was not entirely Apple's fault, as the incorrect location was included in the official Australian Gazetteer.

Quote:

In this case, the Australian Gazetteer - the authoritative list of 300,000-plus placenames, complete with coordinates - includes two Milduras. One is the "real" town, the other is an entry for "Mildura Rural City", coordinates -34.79724 141.76108. It's this second entry that points to the middle of the Murray-Sunset National Park, just near a spot called Rocket Lake.

The report notes that this second point that Apple was mistakenly associating with searches for Mildura is in fact simply the geographic center of the area included within the Mildura Rural City local government area and thus does not correspond to the actual city of Mildura.

In his recent TV interview with Brian Williams, Tim Cook said that Apple "screwed up" with Maps and was now "putting the entire weight of the company behind correcting it." The company does, however, still have a significant amount of work ahead of it as it tries to catch up with Google's years-long head start.

Just fixing this error is not enough, Apple. You guys need to fix your whole Map database as quickly as possible, and bring Google Maps back as an interim solution while you people figure out the problems. Lots of angry customers are switching to other platforms because of this, but I am still sticking around because I expect you guys to fix it very soon.

Why in the world did Apple ditch Google Maps? Was it a case of "Not Invented Here Syndrome?"

Seriously strange - I mean does Apple have a YouTube site, a Facebook clone, or what else? It's strange that they decided to ditch Google Maps.

Or why not just purchase a company like Garmin?

Garmin isn't just a small start-up, buying them would be a pretty big chunk of change, though with the situation they are in, I would be considering at least completely licensing a more established company's map database. Clearly Apple's deal with TomTom isn't good enough.

This is not a small problem for apple. Friends who are not savvy are moving away from iPhones and into Samsung devices saying they use maps every day. When you're in the city, you ask where you're gonna meet up for drinks or for dinner. Poof, open google maps...errrr...apple maps. It's really an every day app. But Apple simply broke it. It really renders the iPhone an inferior product. It doesn't matter the millions of apps on the phone...the one we use the 3rd most...(outside of SMS and the phone itself)..doesn't work.

Ripping off Google Maps, or just maps? Google did not invent maps. They didn't even invent digital maps, or digital maps on the internet.

For reals. I think MapQuest was around first. Google Maps is successful because it piggybacked onto Google search, which is why pretty much everything Google puts out has some level of success. If you visit Google to search for something, which most people do, you're exposed to a Google product if it relates to what you're looking for.

If Coke was only sold at McDonald's and Pepsi was only sold at some small hot dog stand chain, who do you think would sell more no matter how good either product was?